Google's plan to remove third-party cookies from Chrome does little to change the underlying dynamics of the surveillance-based behavioral advertising industry
The demise of surveillance capitalism has been greatly exaggerated. — GOOGLE GOT SOME good press a few weeks ago when it announced …
WiredGilad Edelman
Context & Ripple Effects
When Google announced its plan to remove third-party cookies from Chrome in March 2021, it paired the move with a promise not to build alternate identifiers for tracking users after the phase-out. But the replacement it proposed, FLoC, was immediately flagged by EFF as behavioral targeting under another name — avoiding cookies' specific privacy risks while creating new ones by grouping users into cohorts advertisers can target.
Three years on, that skepticism looks vindicated: Google's formal elimination timeline began with a 1% user testing period, and when that restriction hit in January 2024, marketers, adtech firms, and publishers said Google had done too little to prepare the market. The Wired argument is that the underlying economics of surveillance-based advertising survive the cookie's death.
First-order effects
Advertisers and adtech companies lose the third-party cookie as a targeting primitive but gain FLoC-style cohort signals, so behavioral targeting capacity largely persists inside Chrome's walls.
Second-order effects
Because Google controls both Chrome and the ad business that consumes the signals, rivals and publishers face a market where the rules are set by the largest beneficiary — pushing competitors toward their own identity alternatives while publishers absorb targeting losses.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, browser-level privacy changes consolidate rather than dismantle behavioral advertising: the industry shifts from open-web cookies to platform-owned cohorts and identifiers, with privacy outcomes determined by whoever operates the browser.
The trend: Web privacy reform is becoming platform consolidation, as the companies removing cross-site trackers replace them with proprietary targeting systems they alone control.
Ethics washing👉 “Google's new frameworks are designed to leave everything else about microtargeted advertising in place. Under the FLoC proposal, users are still tracked; it's just Chrome doing the tracking.” H/T @gemmagaldon https://www.wired.com/...
@julie17usc
Julie Cohen on x
Google appropriating individualist conceptions of privacy to distract from the fact that surveillance business models extract surplus from profiled population cohorts. Shocker. https://twitter.com/...
@jason_kint
Jason Kint on x
This is a damn smart report by @GiladEdelman. He properly calls Google's recent announcements, “Privacy Theatre.” https://www.wired.com/...
@wired
@wired on x
When Google announced it would remove third-party cookies from the Chrome browser, the decision was widely billed as a potential sea change for online privacy. But dig into the company's actual plans, and it's clear that's not really what's going on https://www.wired.com/...
@judyshapiro
Judy Shapiro on x
Another crazy good quote from @WIRED article by @GiladEdelman about online surveillance: “Dominant model of advertising undermines quality journalism...allowing information logged about readers to be used to target them more cheaply when they go elsewhere” https://www.wired.com/.…
@judyshapiro
Judy Shapiro on x
1/2 Crazy great article from Wired's @GiladEdelman about Cookie-pocalypse that's impressively accurate given this topic's ability to befuddle adtech's most brilliant minds. “Under proposal, users are still tracked; it's just Chrome doing the tracking.... https://www.wired.com/...
@brave
@brave on x
“If your reference point is what Chrome allows now, this is better,” said @pes10k at Brave. “But if your reference point is what any other browser allows, or what any reasonable definition of privacy really means, this is awful.” https://www.wired.com/... via @wired
@oliverdarcy
Oliver Darcy on x
“Google's announcement is a classic example of what you might call privacy theater: While marketed as a step forward for consumer privacy, it does very little to change the underlying dynamics of an industry built on surveillance-based ... advertising.” https://www.wired.com/...